Robert Scoble has started a Longhorn blog. Information might be light until the upcoming PDC, but it could be a good source of info on Microsoft’s next OS. I may be a Mac user, but it’s good to keep an eye on the other side of the fence. ;)
A couple thoughts, purely on the presentation. The UI looks bearable, and seems to match some of the leaked Longhorn shots we’ve seen so far. The headers for each of the sections in the sidebar look a couple pixels too high to me, though, like they’re crowding the divider lines. Who knows how much of that is just a web rendering issue (or even a browser issue), though. Comment support, but no Trackback, which is a shame (or maybe Trackback is there, but Robert doesn’t have it turned on — I see a ‘Trackback’ counter under the ‘Statistics’ section of the sidebar).
Code-wise, it’s less of a mess than I’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but it could use some improvement. While the main content is structured with CSS, the overall page is still heavily table-based. Images are missing title tags, and there’s still some ALL CAPS tags used (according to specs, HTML tags should be lower case). Still, it’s at least readable code, which is better than I was guessing I’d see when I pulled up the source, and it doesn’t seem to have any IE-specific nastiness. Maybe there are a few people in Microsoft who are starting to get a clue. ;)
It’s not too bad looking. I actually kind of like it. It shows up fine on my Linux/Mozilla combination. Not sure if I’ll go back to Windows when Longhorn comes out. They’d have to really do something neat for me to switch back. If anything, I’d probably switch to a Mac before switching back to a Windows operating system.
this is why i am a geek-muffin. geeky but soft and mushy.
i am confused by your comments. longhorn is supposed to be an OS, right? but then you sort of talk about it like it’s a blog publishing system… i’m lost! :(
maybe this is not such a reflection on the level of my geekiness but on the level at which my brain is addled today… or even worse, the level at which my brain has curdled today….
I think he is actually referring to the layout of the blog that is dedicated to the future Windows Longhorn OS. Right? At least that’s what I got out of his comments in his post.
Um, the Longhorn blogs were NOT done by Microsoft. Just thought I’d clear that up. They were done by a 21-year-old-guy for free. I agree they are darn nice, though.
Hey guys. My name is Robert McLaws, and I am the Administrator for LonghornBlogs.com. Wanted to leave a quick comment. It’s funny you mentioned that it looked like some leaked screenshots of Longhorn. That was actually exactly the look we intended.
Sorry about the trackback thing. That was totally my fault. I shut that subsystem off because I didn’t want to launch the site early. it’s all back on now.
I tried to clean up the design just a bit and make the layout more readable. I’m always looking to improve the site, so let me know if you have any ideas. Title tags are coming from the .Text engine, not the individual pages, and we had to rely on tables for some thins, because of the way we wanted the layout.
Make sure you guys check out the main feed to at http://www.longhornblogs.com too. We’ve got lots of plans for that section of the site.
I hope you guys enjoy it. This was a lot of hard work for everyone involved.
Kirsten/Swami: Yeah, re-reading that post, it is a little muddled. Longhorn is the upcoming OS, while the Longhorn blogs site is (I believe) dedicated to Longhorn-specific posts and discussion. The design of the site is (as Robert M. mentioned in his post) modeled after what we’ve seen of Longhorn so far. I just kind of ran everything together.
Robert S.: Thanks for clearing that up — I either hadn’t read closely enough, or I’d just made the assumption. Or both. ;)
Robert M.: Thanks for stopping by! My comments weren’t really meant to diss on the site, at all, I hope they weren’t taken too much in that vein. As a long-time Mac user (fan [zealot?]) I have an near-instinctive skepticism when it comes to Microsoft in general, and having been bit hard by the CSS/standards bug over the past few years in web design, I’m often poking around in code to see how sites are put together. While I’m not sure it came across well in my original post, I was actually fairly pleasantly surprised by how clean the majority of the code was — after seeing far too many FrontPage (or [shudder] Word) produced websites and the mess of code that they produce, I was actually pretty impressed.
I’ll defintitely be keeping an eye out — while I don’t see myself suddenly ditching the Mac, I try to stay at least somewhat knowledgable about things over on the Microsoft side of things without being too terribly biased. ;)